


Until the Quiet Comes

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 21:37:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15252552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: When Grace leans over late into the night and rests her head against Frankie’s shoulder, she fights not to weep openly. She finds Grace’s hand under the table and wills it not to shake in pain. She wishes she could be happy, but it’s hard when half of her heart is sitting in another chest.





	Until the Quiet Comes

**Author's Note:**

> *If you like angst and hating yourself and everything else, this is the fic for you! It pained me to write it but hopefully, the ending makes it worth the pain. I wrote it as Season 5 speculation and it turned out to be way wrong. (Thank God)
> 
> **I borrowed a little wording from the Maya Angelou poem “Alone” at the end of part two. If you haven’t read it, it packs a lot of feels.

_One_ :

He knocks on the door of Walden Villas with the deed in his hand, leaning against the door jamb and looking smug. She eyes him with caution like always, feeling her fur rise just at the sight of him.

“Hiya, Kooky,” he smiles.

She glances back inside of the small apartment area she and Grace share, hoping like hell she hasn’t heard his voice.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she whispers, knowing quite obvious why he’s here. Hoping against hope that she is terribly wrong.

“Peace offering?” he suggests and hands Frankie the paperwork.

She takes it begrudgingly and flips through the document. It certainly looks legal and while she would love to take it and whack him senseless until he leaves, the commotion would surely lure Grace from her room where she is working on Vybrant in secrecy.

“So you think you can buy our house and win her back with it? Man, you’ve got a ground dragging pair, don’t you?” Frankie hands back the papers and crosses her arms. For a more grumpy effect, she leans against the door too, blocking his sight and path.

“Of course not. But I don’t know what else to do for her to show her I’m serious. You don’t know what it’s like to be without her,” he tries for a nod of sympathy.

She wants to say, _Yes, I do. It seemed like I was on another planet instead of the same continent. 800 miles felt like half a world away. Even another room feels too far now._

“It must be nice to have more money than you know what to do with. What’s the going rate of a heart these days?” She grabs the paperwork out of his hand again, looking at the sales figure. “Pretty hefty price tag, financially. Where were you for the emotional work though? In Japan while the two of us tried to create another life together, again. That’s all you men do. Think about yourselves.”

His mouth hangs agape and he stutters a bit as she tosses his cherished gift back to him.

“Is this a power thing or a sex thing? Because you’re busting my chops here and I can’t figure out which one it’s tied to.”

Her words mirrored back now incenses the ever-loving shit out of her. She steps out of the doorway and closes it a bit, keeping her hand on the knob but leaning forward.

“It’s a thing you wouldn’t understand,” she growls.

“Frankie?”

Damn it to hell.

Opening the door, it reveals Grace on the other side. She’s got a questioning look on her face until she sees him standing behind Frankie.

“Nick, what are you doing here? I thought you had business to attend to today.”

“I did,” he says, breezing by Frankie and handing the deed to Grace. Her eyes light up like lanterns when she reads it. Throwing her arms around him, she whispers over and over things like “Oh, my God. I can’t believe you bought it back” and “This can’t mean what I think it does” and “How on earth did you manage?”

She watches the whole thing from the doorway, an afterthought lost in a whirlwind.

When Grace kisses him, Frankie beats a hasty retreat to her room, closing herself off to what feels like the entire world standing in her living room.

 _Two_ :

He does it on her birthday, of all fucking days. While a tired cliche is something she should have expected, it takes Frankie completely by surprise.

Brianna and Mallory had arrived with nominal food choices, befitting the birdlike intake of their mother. Not one damn cake in sight, a pathetic fact for a seventy-fifth birthday. She’d like to add a sugary confection and minus a ham from the shenanigans as she watches Nick tell some tired story that only amuses the others at the table.

She glares at his hand staying glued to any part of Grace he can touch: a shoulder, a hip, the expanse of her neck as he wraps his arm around her. Frankie feels like screaming into the sea wind.

The urge becomes unbearable when, after he’s regaled the group of something or other, he stands and holds his glass in the air.

“You know, two years ago when I walked past my conference room and saw her face, I never would have guessed the most astounding woman I had ever seen would be mine,” he begins.

Frankie feels the bile rise. She brings a fist to her mouth and prays to whatever’s up there in the sky to help her keep down whatever’s in her esophagus.

“And now here we are, things back to normal and life moving forward. Which is why…” he stops and reaches in his pocket.

_No, no. Jesus fuck, no._

This can’t be happening. It absolutely can’t. As he pulls the velvet box out and shows it to the table, Frankie feels her heart shatter into. She would wonder if Grace could see the pieces scattering the table, but she has her eyes riveted to him as he opens the box and reveals the biggest honking diamond ring Frankie has ever seen.

She feels tears spring in her eyes and she looks Heavenward, silently questioning. She shakes her head and turns her gaze back to the beach house, the place they’re getting settled back in to after months of being displaced.

“Grace, will you marry me?” he says with awe in his voice.

Mallory and Brianna beam but Frankie can barely keep it together. The tablecloth is bunched in her hands under the table and she’s going to lose it, all over this preplanned sideshow she wishes she weren’t at.

 _He did this right in front of me, the bastard._ Knowing full well what the darkest corners of her heart held. While she may not have let them be known to Grace, that day he showed up at Walden Villas, he’d read her like a book: _let me take the one thing from you that you value most._

When the inevitable hits the air, the gooey “yes,” Frankie is almost sure her life is at its end because no one, not anyone, can live without a heart in their chest.

 _Three_ :

She’s knee deep in books and binders when Frankie walks in for a snack after spending hours stashed away in the studio, has the ovaries to look up with delight in her eyes and hand waving wildly, wanting Frankie to come near.

It’s so dangerous to do these days, what with the impending nuptials approaching. She has adopted the philosophy of “out of sight, out of mind” which has worked rather brilliantly so far. And annoyingly. Grace no longer seeks her out, no longer comes to her when she’s lonely.

_Because she’s not lonely anymore._

Which is why, when she asks Frankie for her input on the planning, Frankie can do nothing but stare at her dumbfounded.

“You know this isn’t really my forte, right? I mean, you ask me and wind up with alpacas and yurts,” Frankie deflects, trying to adopt an air of casualty that never quite arrives. “Plus I think based off of my track record, I’m really not one to be giving opinions when my last two relationships went down in flames.”

 _Three_ , she had wanted to say, because isn’t that what’s happening now too? But she doesn’t.

The dodge works well enough but the engagement party still goes on as planned. While her soul is at a back table, hiding in the canoes lined against the wall, or half a mile down the fucking beach, her physical body is smack dab in front with their families and a breath away from Grace, who sits in the middle between her and her soon to be spouse.

Frankie plays with shrimp on her plate, smearing cocktail sauce over their bodies to create a falsified bloody death for them, reflecting her own dark thoughts. The floral arrangement smells waft into her nose, turning her stomach and the mauve, gauze fabric they’ve used as decor blurring in the ocean breeze.

Her throat feels dry but the champagne flute to her right won’t settle the dust in her windpipe. This whole ordeal, from inception to now, has been an exercise in restraint.

Out by the water earlier, she’d walked down the sand when prompted, stood to Grace’s left side like asked, bit her tongue until it bled when the faux minister had said, “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” She’d walked back to the dinner spitting blood out on the beach, trailing behind the merriment. Another afterthought.

If there’s air filling her lungs, it sure doesn’t feel like it. Every breath is labored and hyperventilation is clawing. _I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this_ plays on repeat at a deafening rate in her brain.

When Grace leans over late into the night and rests her head against Frankie’s shoulder, she fights not to weep openly. She finds Grace’s hand under the table and wills it not to shake in pain. She wishes she could be happy, but it’s hard when half of her heart is sitting in another chest.

 _Four_ :

Same routine, different day. Only this time, it’s for real and she digs her toes into the sand as her maid of honor dress billows in the wind. Up ahead, the minister chats jovially with passersby and people from their life mill about, chatting here and there.

She stands removed from it all, not wanting to interact with any human or otherwise at the risk of falling apart. Sol and Robert had been a narrow escape and Bud and Coyote downright impossible almost. Mallory was too wrapped up in the fanfare to care but Brianna seemed to sense something in Frankie that echoed clear: _leave me alone._

The sentiment is fitting really as she walks in a haze down the stretch of beach when the music starts, stands feeling bereft as the proceedings begin. _I’m really about to_ be _alone,_ she thinks as words hit the air, none of which she internalizes.

Five damn years ago, none of this would have been a possibility. She’d so learned to dislike even the idea of Grace that life was easy to live. Although not fuller.

With scraping and whittling and etching, the product that time has created is more beautiful than anything she’s ever crafted with her hands. To have that ripped away seems like the greatest injustice she’s ever had to experience. This coming from a woman who thought she’d lost the love of her life a half-decade ago, only to realize she hadn’t found it yet. Ah, the paradox.

Perhaps that’s why, when the ceremony gets to the “Speak now or forever hold your peace” part and it isn’t an act because it’s hella real, she mumbles an apology. The radiant and beaming figure beside her loses her smile the instant Frankie shoves away from her and high tails it to a place she hopes no one will follow.

Absolutely fucking no one.

 _Five_ :

It’s officially dusk now and she’s managed to royally destroy the dress that she agreed to wear for a woman who, on paper is a best friend but in reality, is so much more. Sand clings to it everywhere and the tide soaked the bottom lining of it before it began its retreat into the sea.

Around her, she’s built her sandcastle brainstorm. It’s a shame that artificial intelligence doesn’t exist and she can’t connect her brain to some digitized daydream. She saw that on an episode of one of those shows you binge on the internet. The ending had certainly stuck its landing better than this though.

She flings sand on the towers that rise into the air, giving them a gothic architecture look with points extending. A belly flop onto one of the spires wouldn’t have the desired effect for her fatalist attitude though, only ending in knocking the air from her lungs and smearing wet sand on her chest.

“Damnnit,” she mutters into the air, let’s the curse drift out on the horizon.

“Basically the same thing I said to myself when you left me hanging on my wedding day,” the voice behind her says.

Frankie turns quickly to see Grace awash in the dying light of the sun, white lace dress stained with tan now. Her chest constricts, but she keeps her words tucked inside. Afraid.

“I thought I might find you here,” Grace nods and looks around. “It does have a special meaning, considering we got high on peyote and vomited right about here on our first night together.”

She comes to sit beside Frankie and stares out across the space. Frankie gasps, that expensive garment of hers surely as ruined as her own now. She turns and throws Frankie a lazy smile then leans back on her hands which rest behind her.

“How many fucking tropes was I going for with all of this? I mean, I’m wearing white for Christ’s sake,” she laughs and shakes her head.

Frankie is still in shock that Grace is beside her and still can’t find the right things to pour forth with.

“Not much of a talker today, are you? I never thought I’d live to see this,” Grace chuckles again.

“It’s not funny,” Frankie finally whispers, so quiet that even Grace with her good hearing can barely hear it.

“So you do speak.”

“Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, back there dancing with your new husband or whatever horseshit people do at wedding receptions?” Frankie angrily growls and stands. It boils over and she swipes at one of the towers of her castle with her foot, knocking it to rubble. “Grace Skolka has a terrible ring to it, by the way.”

“And Grace Bergstein flows more easily off the tongue?”

Frankie startles at the question, turns quickly to look at Grace amidst rage and shock.

“I didn’t say that,” Frankie skulks. The f-ing irony.

Grace stands and blocks Frankie’s pacing route, hands connecting firmly with her shoulders to halt her. “It’s kind of hard to marry a person when you’re in love with someone else,” she murmurs, gently caressing Frankie’s cheek.

Frankie wrenches free, tears coming with force now. It seems like all she can do lately, let her emotions drip from her body in liquid form. “Don’t do this to my heart. She’s already been through enough.”

“I’m not,” Grace sighs, the guilt seeping out in the two words. “I couldn’t, not to you. Not now.”

“You _knew_ ,” Frankie gambles, letting the hurt creep again. “I sat there for the last two years on the sidelines. I was always there, Grace. For every damn twist and turn and up down, I was there for you. I had to watch and pretend like everything was a-okay and that I wasn’t dying a little inside every time you touched him or he got to be near you. When I came back from Santa Fe and found out you’d let him…” she trails off, the truth choking her. “You let him be in you and on you and that was just too much. And it only got worse because I couldn’t say a word…”

Her verbal spewage ends because Grace wraps her hands so tightly around Frankie’s body, pulling her by the waist into her own form. Frankie almost forgets to keep respiration as a process for her body. Her head falls and Grace lifts it back to be even with her own using a long, delicate finger under Frankie’s chin.

“Maybe, subconsciously, I did know. I thought I could see it in your face but I didn’t want to be wrong. I didn’t…” She’s got her own tears joining the fray now and between the two of them, Frankie is sure they can create an ocean of sorrow and drown in it.

“You’ve got to believe me. I thought Nick was my last chance at happiness but I _was_ wrong. It’s been standing in front of me this whole damn time.” She smiles that incandescent smile again, even through tears, and Frankie knows she is done for. Well and cooked.

“This can’t be happening. It can’t,” Frankie all but wails in disbelief. Her forehead comes to rest against Grace’s and she lets the unbidden tears fall in earnest.

“Maybe it took me having my toes on a ledge to see I was just fine on solid ground,” she whispers and strokes, presses herself impossibly closer against Frankie’s skin.

Grace kisses her then and the world doesn’t realign. As Frankie deepens their connection, holding on for dear life, the earth corrects itself a little though.

A small stitch is created on an open heart.


End file.
